Julian Casablancas’s recent live shows with his new backing band the Voidz have been, by most accounts, an absolute godawful nightmare. (I saw him at SXSW, and yeesh.) This past weekend, he played at a club in Santiago, Chile as a sideshow to the Lollapalooza Chile festival, and it’s not like those reports are getting any better. (Here’s one review that calls his show a “painful spectacle.”) But at least he’s taking some steps to please crowds. At the Chile show, he played the Strokes song “Take It Or Leave It” solo for the first time. Below, you can watch a fan-made video. It’s not great.

He’s added fan favorite “11th Dimension” to the setlist, too.

In one recent interview, Casablancas claims that he’s hoping to release his album with the Voidz in September. Also, here’s a video interview of Casablancas in Chile, sounding a bit defensive and claiming that his band has never had a chance to soundcheck for any of its shows. And he mentions that there is a Daft Punk collaboration in addition to “Instant Crush” that hasn’t been released.

UPDATE: You can watch Julian Casablancas + the Voidz’s full Lolla set below.

“Sounding a bit defensive”–gee, I wonder why, when literally every online publication are taking every opportunity they can to actively shit on a band that has played less than ten live shows in their life and have not even released an album yet.

I mean, I agree, obviously, these live videos aren’t great, or even good, but yeesh. Give the guy a break.

I was in both shows and they were awful! I’m a big The Strokes and Julian’s fan but his new proposal is beyond my understanding, The worst thing is he wants sounding like that, he made a specific arrangement in his mic which make the vocal barely audible. Whole band sounds very loud and very distorted and the result is a very very bad experience. I really don’t know what he is trying to do o to demonstrate. I hope he came back to the right path some day,

I’ve got more than a few problems with the reporting surrounding Julian’s new Voidz stuff. Absolutely none of the articles are objective in the slightest. I know you’re primarily a review blog, but have you ever considered that beyond those, your opinions are totally superfluous? Can’t you just post links to videos and song samples like this and not worry about your vague, unoriginal, shitty, and seemingly totally arbitrary ruling that something is cool. Congratulations, you and half the reviewing world think that this and Comedown Machine suck. Why are you posting links to Julian Casablancas stuff at all when you’re just catering it to the people that think it’s bad? Take a break from shoving your hipness down people’s throats and leave the opinions to the comment section, which are proof enough you don’t need to keep telling people what to think.

Also, “it’s not great”?! Show me any live Strokes performance of Take It or Leave It that isn’t virtually identical. And I know that this isn’t going to make much of any difference to the site. You’ll keep posting new Voidz stuff and panning it, I’ll voice my outrage, and you’ll get more hits. But, I do believe that people like you should only feel worse about themselves when they sleep at night. What have you actually contributed to the world other than negative writings that are totally indebted to and derivative of the artwork they discuss? If you go home every night and work on original songs or you paint or write fiction, I half-rescind my disgust. But if not, you’re a useless human being. Consider adding to the canon of art instead of just deeming it “not great”.

I don’t understand this narrative stereogum has created. The press was pretty positive relating to this project up until the last of Julian’s sxsw shows. Then he have one arguably bad performance, and the whole thing shifted. We haven’t heard anything from the studio, and all we have to go off of is fan videos and live streams from festivals, which never sound great. Those guitarists sound great, and there’s so much cool stuff in the new songs. It’s really lame when you guys do nothing but bash a band when you haven’t even really heard them…..

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